Mike Lux

Progressive activist and strategist Mike Lux.

(Progressive Strategies)

In The American Crisis, No. 4, Thomas Paine wrote, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.” Mike Lux has spent his entire adult life undergoing such fatigues—not just supporting our freedom, but also strengthening it. He has worked for numerous progressive causes and organizations, such as the Iowa AFL-CIO, People for the American Way, Americans United for Change, Women’s Voices/Women Vote, Progressive Majority, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and American Family Voices. He has also worked for five different presidential campaigns, including Joe Biden’s in 1988, the Clinton/Gore campaign, and the Obama/Biden transition team. During the Clinton presidency he was appointed special assistant to the president for public liaison, where he helped organize outreach for the 1993-94 health care reform battle. He also served in a similar role last year during the Obama/Biden transition. Currently, Lux is the CEO of Progressive Strategies, a political consulting firm he co-founded in 1999. Lux’s firm offers strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, political action committees, and progressive donors.

In January 2009, Lux released his first book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be. In it he explains how progressives have strengthened our democracy and our civil and political rights throughout history, even in the face of incredible adversity and relentless opposition from conservatives. Highlighting what he calls “big change moments,” Lux shows that during certain periods in history—brought forth by progressive pioneers and the speeches or documents that they wrote—Americans have seized the opportunity to turn away from conservative policies that set our country back and instead pushed for forward-thinking progressive policies.

Campus Progress recently sat down with Mike Lux and talked to him about why progressives have struggled to make headway in recent years, how Millennials have contributed to the emergence of the current big change moment, and what needs to happen during it.

Why did you feel it was important to write this book?

Conservatives use history and abuse history to make their point and do it very effectively and have done it very effectively over the years—always arguing that history is on their side. So I think it’s really important that progressives understand that the progressive movement has actually been behind everything good that has happened in the country, and that when we have been in power and that when we’ve made the changes that we’ve advocated that the country has gotten better; that the country has become a country that we can be even more proud of.

You give your readers a great history lesson that shows how progressives in the past have compromised on their values—as was the case with Jim Crow—or turned a blind eye to horrific practices such as slavery for political or financial reasons. To what extent to you see this happening today?

When you look at what’s going on today, the financial sector has corrupted a lot of folks—including a lot of folks that started out with good values. But I think that sometimes it’s easy to make more money. A lot of people that I know do become lobbyists for special interests or go into the special interest game and make a lot of money in it, and it has compromised some of our values, and it has in some ways compromised our ability to really make a difference in the country. Now, I don’t think everybody who lobbies for corporations is corrupt—I know a lot of good people who do it, and a lot of them actually try to move corporations in the right direction. But there are clearly both some politicians and some lobbyists who just decided to get in bed with big special interests to the detriment of the public interest.

You talk a lot about big change moments in the book. In the last chapter you assert that we now have the opportunity to bring about the next big change moment. Can you sum up what you think needs to happen to bring about this change?

Absolutely. That’s easy. First of all, we have to completely restructure our health care financing system. It is a complete mess. It’s been mess for a long time. Back when I was in the Clinton White House, we worked on the health care issue and tried to reform it then and did not succeed. It’s gotten even worse since. So that’s fundamental building block number one.

Number two, we have to move very, very quickly on a major restructuring of the energy industry, both on the consumption side and on the production side, because we are not going to survive climate change if we don’t make big changes in a hurry. The planet won’t survive and the entire way that humans live and work will really go down the tubes. So that’s the second big thing.

The third big thing is I think we need to start investing in working people and poor people again, rather than just saying that all problems are going to be solved with more tax cuts to the rich. I think that we need to do everything we can to raise wages—to sort of help create a bigger and growing and more prosperous middle class, rather than a more squeezed and more harried and poorer middle class. I think that is incredibly important and I think there are a lot of elements to that. One of them is the kind of public investment that we’ve been doing through the economic recovery package, but I also think allowing workers to organize in unions is really important—the Employee Free Choice Act is incredibly important—and raising the minimum wage is incredibly important. Doing things that help lift the overall wage scale in a whole variety of ways is essential to rebuilding the economy.

The final thing I would mention—and fortunately there is a big piece of this is in the economic recovery package—is that we need to have universal broadband, and we need to have a complete version of net neutrality. We really need to open up our telecommunications industry so that it is more democratic, so that we end the digital divide, so that poor people as well as rich people can be involved in it. And I think that if we do those things it will dramatically add to the country’s ability to grow economically.

Some people argue that it may be too challenging to try to do all these things at once. Do you think they’re being overly cautious?

I do. You know, the interesting thing is that what history has shown is that you can do a lot of big things at once. That you take the momentum from one big reform and use it for the next big reform—that movements on issues and battles over issues inspire the next battle over issues and that you really can move on a number of different fronts at the same time. And frankly, I think we need to. We’ve been ignoring these problems for so long—or in many cases making them worse—that we don’t really have a choice anymore. We are in crisis in this country and we’ve got to do something big, and we’ve got to have big ideas to solve it. We can’t solve one thing at a time and then slowly move to the next one.

Considering the magnitude of threatening issues our country and the world now face, do you think that if we are successful in this next big change moment that it could possibly be the greatest achievement progressives have ever made in our country’s history? And, on the flip side, if we don’t bring about big change that it could possibly be our greatest failure?

I think it could be the most consequential failure ever in our history, and let me address that part of the question first. I believe that, like in 1933, like in 1861, we are in a moment of true crisis in this country, and that if we are not successful in solving some of the major problems it potentially is going to spiral out even worse, that the economic disaster that faces us will get worse, and that all these problems will build on themselves and that we will have a very, very nasty populous backlash. I talk about the positive populism in my book but I think there is the potential for a very, very nasty backlash that’s going to have a racial component because of Barack Obama being African American, that it’s going to have an anti-immigration component, that it’s going to have an anti-poor-person component. If we are not successful I think this country could go down a very dark path, that the likes of Sarah Palin and worse could come back strong and win public office. And I think that’s a very scary scenario. So the consequences of failure are huge.

In terms of whether this will be the sort of biggest and best era for progressive change, which was the first part of your question, I think it has that potential but it’s hard to compare because we’ve had some moments in this country where amazing things have happened all at once. You know, in 1962 and 1963, for example, you had Martin Luther King writing the “I Have a Dream” speech; you had Betty Friedan writing the Feminine Mystique, which started the feminist movement; you had Rachel Carson writing Silent Spring, which started the environmental movement; you had Tom Hayden and the folks who organized Students for a Democratic Society starting the student movement; you had Cesar Chavez starting the farm worker movement. All that happened in about an 18-month period, and there was a just a wave of positive things that came out of that over the next several years, one right after another. The 1930s, the early 1900s, and the 1860s were all in that category: huge, positive change that moved the country forward. I hope we can get so that we can compare ourselves to that era and debate which era was the best. And I think we can and hope we will.

Today’s youth—the Millennials—have incredibly progressive attitudes and advocate bold and substantial change. Do you think that Millennials will be the generation who brings about the next big change moment and what advice would you give to Millennials in that regard?

Well, I think that if we have a big change moment—and I believe we will—I think it is really do in great, great part to Millennials. I spoke recently to Young People For, which is one of my favorite youth organizations, and I said to them that the entire world and the generations older than them owe young people an incredible debt, that it was young people who saw us going down the wrong track first, it was young people who broke away from the Bush ideology first and started to turn against him several years before other age groups did, and it was young people who provided the margin of victory for Barack Obama in most of the key, critical states, as well as nationwide. So it was young people really who have led the charge and their organizing work, their passion, and their ability to express themselves online are going to make a huge difference over the next few years in changing the country.

Lauren Yingling is a freelance writer and proud Millennial. In 2005 she graduated from the University of Delaware. She can be reached at lymd22@yahoo.com.

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